


I do not think that they will sing to me

by Beleriandings



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Grief, Singing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 19:00:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3661407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nimrodel knows she can never return to the world she has known, not after the loss of Amroth. But the sea draws the lost to it, and she finds she is not the only one lamenting by its shore. The strange elf she meets there seems older than anyone she has known before, but what terrible secrets does his past truly hold?</p>
            </blockquote>





	I do not think that they will sing to me

> _We have lingered in the chambers of the sea  
>  _ _By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown  
>  _ _Till human voices wake us, and we drown._

 

 

The world was different here, the bright air full of the salt tang of the ocean instead of the quiet loamy warmth of forest earth. The sun flickered in and out from beneath gusting clouds, almost mocking her in the tentative hope of its pale golden spring light. Gulls dived and swooped overhead as Nimrodel stared desperately out at the little white-capped waves, focussed on the horizon, looking and looking until her eyes ached.

 _Out there. Amroth was out there somewhere. Did his body lie on the ocean floor, the water filling his lungs?_  She had not seen the storm that had raged overhead, but she could imagine it, as clearly as if she had been there. Clouds purple-black, the waves like hills of iron grey, lit by blinding flashes of lightning. The deck pitching and water sluicing over the wooden planks. The next day, dawning pale and misty as Amroth opened his eyes. His dear, familiar face, contorting in horror as he saw no shore, or perhaps the wrong shore. His despair, driving him screaming into the dawn-lit, glass-flat ocean.

 _My fault_. She pressed her eyes closed for a moment, feeling the pain sweep through her once more.  _We could have been away if I had not lingered, we could have been gone, off to a new life together, a safe place_ … she opened her eyes, staring out at the sea once more.

A flash of movement caught the corner of her eye, and she blinked as the breeze quickened, whipping her hair into her face. The little round-bottomed valley where she stood sloped down to a narrow beach, barely move than a strip of sand and pebble clinging to the cliff-face at high tide. She squinted down, trying to see through the sun’s glare off the slicked wet sand.

_There._

The figure was unmistakeable, picking its way along the tide line. She could not see a face, but she could make out the silhouette of a heavy cloak, long tendrils of hair lifting in the cold sea breeze.

A wildness overtook her then, a sudden irrational thought;  _it must be him. It must be. Who else could it be?_

She began to run.

Her boots sank into the sand - still wet from the morning’s rain - as she came to the beach, each step an effort. She looked up, panting and scanning around for the silhouette, that dark outline, but the figure had disappeared around the chalky cliffs of the headland.  She let out her breath, half a curse, half a choking sob, covering her face with her hands.  _It wasn’t him. It was only a ghost, just a shadow of your grief, and now even that’s gone._

Still, she straightened, and slowly she began to walk back up the shore, watching as though from a great distance as her feet carried her away.

Another day, another sea. The sea always looked different, she had realised early on, should one return to the exact same place. Or maybe, she had thought then, maybe it was herself that was different.

The clouds roiled and lowered grey above today, bearing down on the surface of the ocean.

Nimrodel stood upon the edge of the sea cliff, looking down at the churning slate-grey water below as the damp wind and the sea spray turned her hair to tendrils lashing across her skin.

_Amroth, are you there? Do you wait for me beneath the sea?_

She tried to imagine stepping into the air, the falling, the cold shock of the water. The sea filling her lungs. She felt tears in her eyes, stinging salt. She edged a foot along the rain-slicked, lichened covered rock, closer to the precipice before her, then snatched it back. She did it again, her heart fluttering like a captured bird.

"I wouldn’t stand so close to the edge if I were you" said a voice from behind her, quiet and cracked from disuse, but somehow carrying like no other voice she had ever heard.

Nimrodel whirled about, eyes wide, almost losing her balance at the start that went through her. She had thought she was alone.

Quick as she had moved, a hand was closing about her wrist, steadying her, pulling her gently but firmly away from the edge. She raised her eyes, her body tensing, ready, suddenly, to fight for her life if need be. The gaze that met hers went through her like a bolt; dark grey-green eyes like the stormy sea below, a face that was scarred and weather beaten beyond the count of years, ancient and full of strangeness. Now, though, he raised an eyebrow at her, still gripping her wrist. When he spoke, his voice was soft and calm, as though he had not just - in all probability, she thought grimly - saved her life. “It’s a very long way to fall.”

She could find no words with which to reply to that. He held her wrist for a moment longer, before letting her go.

Nimrodel snatched her arm back, a little too quickly. “Who are you?”

He sighed. “Does it matter?”

"It does to me."

His mouth twisted. “I am a wanderer. That is to say, merely a passer by, who saw you standing upon the brink. And… well. Let me say simply that I know that particular feeling. All too well.”

She frowned, clasping her hands about her bare arms instinctively as she felt herself shudder in the damp cold, even as the pain lanced through her heart once more. “No you don’t.” She felt a sudden stab of fury at herself.  _I could have joined Amroth in the ocean depths. If I had not been so much of a coward, if I had simply done it, if I had not hesitated, this stranger never could have saved me, I could have, I could have…_

He sighed, taking Nimrodel by surprise with the depths of pain that seemed to twine through the sound. “Perhaps not.” He looked as though he were remembering something long ago, something that cut at his heart like a knife. “But I know what it is to stand upon the brink and look down. To try to imagine what it would  _feel_  like to fall.” His voice was quiet, precise, and his strange eyes never left hers. “And I recognise the signs in another.” He inclined his head, as though he were trying to read her, Nimrodel thought. “You’ve lost someone very dear to you, have you not?”

At that, something within her seemed to crack, and the tears came, cascading down her cheeks and dripping from her chin as she felt her body break into trembling, as she let the stranger hold her steady in his arms. She knew she should mistrust him; she knew he was certainly not what he seemed. But she was too exhausted for mistrust, clutched by a sudden weariness of the heart. And, she thought, as she pressed her face to the worn, faded and patched shoulder of his cloak, the contact with another living person was more welcome than she had expected.

 _Besides_ , she thought bitterly as the sobs wracked her chest,  _the worst he could do would be to kill me._ And wasn’t death what she had wanted, not a minute before?

_Wasn’t it?_

Nimrodel did not have a certain answer to that, so she put the thought from her churning mind, and simply let the tears flow. The two of them stood upon the cliff top, as the wind whipped mercilessly at the waves far below.

He did not, in fact, want to kill her. That much Nimrodel realised rather soon, as he took her to a little natural sheltered spot amongst the tumbled rocks of the clifftop, out of the worst of the wind. She thought he might question her, but instead he wordlessly busied himself starting a small fire. She watched him as he worked, curious despite herself. He looked, she concluded, like he spent a lot of time on his own, feeling no need for speech because he was so unused to it. As he struck stones over the kindling, cursing in a language she did not know as the damp twigs failed to catch, she noticed his hands, a bolt of shock going through her at the sight.

His palms were a mass of scar tissue, pitted and ridged, as though healed to a form that was yet twisted and tortured. “Your hands!” she blurted out, regretting it immediately. “I mean…”

He raised his palms in the air between them, turning them towards her. His face was hard, closed off. “My hands” he said heavily, nodding. She wondered if he was mocking her, but after a moment he returned to his work at the fire. A brief time later, the kindling flared, and suddenly a small fire was crackling between them, and all other thoughts were briefly banished from Nimrodel’s mind as she let the warmth soak into her. She had not realised quite how cold she had been, or that being warm again might make her feel so much better.

Later he left her there, and for a while, she thought in panic that he would not return. It surprised her how much she cared. But he did return, and when he did he had brought back a freshly-killed rabbit which he began to cook over the little fire. Nimrodel had not eaten in days - not since she had heard the news of Amroth, the final, horrible confirmation of what she had so long feared - and she felt her stomach contract painfully at the smell of the cooking meat.

"What’s your name?" she asked, while he was turning the spit.

He looked up at her, for a long while. “Maglor” he said at last, his eyes never leaving her.

She had not expected him to answer. He looked, she thought, as though she were waiting for a reaction from her, but the name meant nothing to Nimrodel. “Is that your real name?”

"Does it matter?" he said, for the second time that day.

"No, I suppose not." She paused, tugging at the bedraggled locks of her hair. "I am Nimrodel. And I suppose I ought to thank you. For before, I mean. And for this." She gestured at the fire, at the shelter from the wind. He had made her wrap his cloak about her shoulders as they sat, and, thin and threadbare and faded beyond any recognisable colour that it was, she was grateful for the scant warmth it offered.

"Who was it, then?" he said after some time, his voice flat and dry.

Her head snapped up to look at him. “Excuse me?”

"Who was it? That you lost?"

She opened her mouth, but found no words. She expected him to press the point but he did not. Instead he turned away. “Sorry” she heard him mutter, after a while, and then, “stay, if you like. For as long as you need.”

She nodded, suddenly exhausted.

"Amroth" she whispered, when the fire was out and she was sure he was asleep. "His name was Amroth."

As she had expected, Maglor did not answer.

When she awoke the next morning, he was gone, the fire quenched and covered over neatly with sand. She sat up, stretching and wincing at the stiffness in her back from sleeping on the hard ground, so unlike the soft leaves on which she had always been accustomed to sleeping in. She looked around. It was early, but the morning was already bright. Her hands went to her belt, checking quickly that her hunting knife was still there, the flints she carried for striking sparks - damp though they must be by now - and, last of all, the little silver ring with the pale green stone, too large for her fingers or even her thumb. She sighed with relief and renewed pain as her fingers brushed its familiar curve.

_It was not a betrothal ring. He had offered her a betrothal ring, rings for them both, but she had laughed carelessly and said she liked his finger with the slightly dented old ring on it that he wore all the time, out of habit, never taking it off although the silver needed cleaning. He had many habits like that; little family heirlooms and treasures meant a lot to him. This was something about Amroth that Nimrodel never failed to find fascinating and strange and delightful in equal measure._

_He had kept the ring, as she asked, but the night he had left her to board his ship, she had woken to find it had been placed on her thumb, her fingers curling about it as she slept under the spreading boughs of the mallorn, her skin warming the silver._

_Perhaps she had known, even then._

Nimrodel shook her head, blinked and looked around her once more. But for the slight pain in her shoulders, and the remains of the fire, she thought, the previous night could almost have been a dream.

She tried to return to north, to the forest, a few times. But every time, the voice of the stream sounded wrong, like it too had changed. Impossible, she knew. The stream was the same. It certainly  _looked_  the same. And yet it sounded different. _Maybe this is what the sea does to you_ , she thought, as she made her weary way back to its shore.  _Maybe once you have heard the sea, you can never quite stop hearing it. Once you have lost the one you love to the sea, it never quite stops singing in your head._

"That was quite a poetic metaphor" said a voice from behind her.

Nimrodel flushed, for she had not realised she had spoken aloud. “Just thinking about things” she mumbled, as Maglor appeared from the gap between two large saltwater-eroded slabs of rock to sit beside her next to the tidal pool. She looked up at him. “What are you doing here?”

His mouth quirked into something that was almost a bitter smile. “I’ve been asking myself that question for many years.”

"Do you live by the sea?"

"You could say that."

"Do you ever…" she sought for words "…see anyone? Talk to anyone?"

"I’m talking to  _you_ , right now.”

"Why?"

The question seemed to catch him by surprise. “Why not?”

"You just said…  _implied_  you never talk to anyone else.”

He laughed, a strange little cough of a chuckle that it sounded like he had not had a reason to use for a very long while. “Fair point. Hmm, I suppose… you intrigue me. Most of the people who end up out here when they run away from home because they’ve lost someone go back, soon enough.”

She glared up at him. “I didn’t run away from - “

"Yes you did. I make no judgement on you; I too ran away from the world, in a sense. I’m merely pointing it out, since you seem to be in denial."

She pressed her lips together, annoyed. “Well thank you” she said dryly. “You informing me of that has made everything better.”

His lip curled in a bitter half-smile, and for a while he seemed lost in his own thoughts, far away.

"Why didn’t  _you_  go back?” she asked him after a while.

"What?"

"You asked me why I never went back. I’m asking you, now."

That bitter smile again. “Don’t you know your history? Does my name truly mean nothing to you?”

She shook her head.

A spasm of pain crossed his weatherbeaten face for a moment. He pursed his lips. “Probably for the better.”

They spoke of it no more, and parted ways once more that evening.

She sang to herself sometimes, when the silence or the sound of the wind in the tall, dry seagrass rattled around inside her head. She found she rather liked the sound of her own voice, for it helped to drown the silence.

One day she was singing a song she used to sing to the stream’s bubbling waters, back in the forest.

_"The water has a silver voice,_  
_The leaves are green and fair,_  
_When sun lights up the golden boughs,  
_ _Beloved, find me there.”_

Her voice stopped in her throat, choking her, like she had swallowed a stone. Then she froze.

Someone else had been singing.

The voice had carried on a little after she had stopped as though to move onto the next verse - not that she had heard any words - and sung the first few notes of a harmony that she had never heard, before breaking off abruptly just as she had done.

"Hello?" she called uncertainly. The voice had been so beautiful. She wondered briefly at the fact that she cared enough to run the risk of meeting someone and having to speak to them.

As ever, when Maglor appeared he came up behind her, but this time she was able to turn at the last moment, catching him before he spoke.

"Your voice is like the river" he told her, by way of greeting.

"Did you know the song?"

"No" he said. "I was improvising." He sang a few notes, without words, to demonstrate.

She tried not to suck in her breath too quickly at the unexpected, aching beauty of his voice. “That tune is better than the original” she said at last.

"Yes" he inclined his head thoughtfully. "But it was written as harmony to the tune."

"I didn’t know you could sing."

He laughed lightly. “I don’t do it often, these days. Except inside my own head. Must keep the stories of my people alive and such, you know.”

Nimrodel didn’t know. “Your people?”

"Ah yes, Nimrodel-the-innocent-of-history, I forgot myself." He breathed in. "My family. They are lost. All of them, except me."

"You meant they’re dead."

"Yes. But also lost, almost certainly forever."

She frowned, not understanding. “You… are you  _not_  lost, then?”

He gave her a searching look. “Not all those who wander are lost, you know. You shouldn’t assume things.”

"So you’re not lost, or not forever."

"Oh no, I most certainly am, to all intents and purposes. But you still shouldn’t assume things."

They shared a fire again, as the sun set and the sky over the western sea turned to blood and then to soft velvet darkness, the evening star rising bright and clear above the calm water.

She caught Maglor staring at it intently, then tearing his gaze away.

"What is it now? What possible grievance can you have with the  _stars_?”

He looked at her long and hard, weariness clouding his gaze. “Better that we leave it unspoken.”

"Why?" She heard an unexplained sharpness in her own voice. "Because I wouldn’t understand?"

"Because I do not want you to feel like you have to try to understand. Making someone feel sympathy for me is the cruellest pain I can inflict." He paused. "These days."

"I have no idea  _what_  that is supposed to mean.”

"Good."

Suddenly she felt anger course through her, anger and frustration. “You’re such a…” she balled her hands into fists as she cast about for words, tears in her eyes that had little to do with the situation at hand.  _Why should this battered old golden-voiced sinner survive so many years when Amroth is dead, the fair king of the wood who loved me? What sense is there to it?_  “You treat me like a wayward child. Stop it.”

His face darkened. “In many ways you are a child. You did not see the before times. All the troubles of this…” his voice was bitter now, as though he was spitting out poison “… this  _little_ world, this fading world, they are but child’s tantrums. You…” he glared at her, “you and your lost love, declaring that you will never return to the world, thinking it’s your fault, that you deserve a life like this. You know nothing of grief, or guilt. You play at exile. I’ve seen it before. You’re all the same. Go back to your forest, Nimrodel, and sing to the water. Find someone new to moon over, and forget about your lost Amroth, and leave me alone.”

She was taken aback, for his words had seemed to come out of nowhere, but she could feel the anger building in her once more, tempered by the renewed grief his needling had brought. “Fine” she said, getting up. “You stay here then, with your eternal misery and introspection, your songs that no one hears. I don’t care about why you hate the stars, I don’t care what you did. You know  _nothing_  about me, or my people, or the one I love. And don’t come and find me again. I hope you fade out of this world.” And with that she turned and ran back inland, onto the grasses on the cliff top that rustled in the night wind.

Her fury took days to die down, and as it did the silence crept over her again.

Sometimes she could not help but think about Maglor’s words, though they infuriated her still.  _Could_  she she return to her home? She touched the silver ring, running the ragged edge of her thumbnail along the groove where the stone met the metal, thinking. No. There were too many of Amroth’s people there, or whoever had succeeded them. She did not want to see them, did not want to speak to them.

And so she was alone. And it hurt.

Which was why, when she saw Maglor next, she did not immediately turn away.

He lay flat on his back on a flat outcrop of rock that protruded from the side of the ragged and tumbled slope that led down to the shore. His feet were bare and his eyes were closed, and he was humming a tune to himself, one arm flung across his face to shield his eyes from the pale sun. For a while she simply watched him, too proud to speak to him, too lonely to leave.

"What is that you are singing?" she said at last.

He sat up, gaze meeting hers. He had dark shadows under his eyes, Nimrodel noticed, even moreso than before. “It’s a song I picked up in the village a little way inland. It’s so small it doesn’t have a name, but it has an inn and a square where people talk and sing songs, and that’s what matters.”

"I thought you were  _lost_ …?”

A hint of a smile. “When I choose to be. I take precautions so that I am not recognised, if that is what you’re worried about. I would be very surprised if anyone there would know my face. My hands… he raised them before him, contemplating the burns on his palms. “Well, myths and legends fade, over time, even as those who make them do.”

 _Perhaps this is just how he is_ , thought Nimrodel to herself, pushing back her exasperation.  _Perhaps he has been too long away from people, so that when he speaks he is only able to be mysterious and vaguely condescending. Perhaps that’s how everyone was in the earlier ages of the world._  She found the pity that she felt for him at the sight of his burned hands somewhat frustrating.

"And what do they speak of there? What do they sing of?" she asked, after a while.

"You" he said. "They sing of you."

She snorted. “I do not think that can be true.”

"It is. The Lay of Nimrodel, it’s called." He hesitated. "I can sing it, if you like."

She frowned. “Spare me. Besides, what is one song about me, compared to the whole hours and days and epic poems worth of song that probably exists about your fabled great and terrible deeds?”

"They do not sing of me" he said, too sharply. "There is a song. I wrote it myself. I don’t think you’d want to hear it though."

"Too sad?"

He nodded. “Too sad. But necessary.”

"Necessary?"

"Someone must live on and sing of the deeds that were done. To ensure that they are the matter of song until the last days of Arda."

She opened her mouth and closed it again.

"Nimrodel" he said at last. "What I said before… I was…"

"A bit of an ass, yes."

He looked uncomfortable. “Yes.”

"To say the least."

He smiled sadly. “May we… start again?”

She thought for a moment. “Perhaps” she said.

He taught her the Lay of Nimrodel, in time. She didn’t care for the song itself, much, and it hurt to hear of Amroth even still, but she felt she must know the words, must let them run through her mind like the waters of the stream. (The stream that had been nameless, which now bore her name, a strange thought in itself.) She had to let them in,  _for otherwise what was it for, if it should disappear and fade in memory?_

It was moments like this that she understood Maglor the best.

They travelled alone; they travelled together, meeting and separating like the waves of the sea, but ever each came back to the shore, and ever they would meet again, together in quiet solitude.

Nimrodel found Maglor an intriguing distraction, at least.

"Your voice" she said to him one day, "is like the sea."

She had not meant it as a compliment, simply as a statement, as they stood side by side on the sea cliffs, but he smiled.

"I’ve been told that before."

"I’m sure."

"Yours sounds like the waters of a bubbling brook."

"I’ve been told that before too."

They left each other and came back together like the tides, picking up strings of conversation almost were they had left off, sometimes.

"Mermaids and mermen live in these waters" he said one morning, matter-of-factly, gesturing out into the bay.

"No they don’t" she scoffed. "You’re making things up again."

"I’m not!"

” _Really._ ”

"Really!" He gave her a sidelong smile. "They sing to travellers on the sea, to lure them to the rocks. On the land too, sometimes."

She laughed. “They must have loud voices, to reach all the way inland.”

"Oh, they do. Very loud indeed."

"You should be careful then" she elbowed him gently. "I’m sure they’d want you as one of them, with your pretty voice."

His face changed, suddenly growing dark. “No, actually I don’t think they would want that at all.”

One day, she was wondering the rocky tidal pools staring out at the iron grey sea, when she heard a familiar voice, raised in song. She stopped to listen; it was hard not to.

She had never heard this song before. It was in a language she did not understand (Quenya, she recalled, the language of the bright land across the sea that had always bored her in the tales) but for some reason it cut into her very heart like a blade.

Slow and immeasurably sad, the melody rippled and turned back on itself in endless variations, turning to bright hope and then changing key, becoming a sonorous lament, and then almost a cry of anguish.

She had never heard Maglor sing like this before. She had never heard  _anyone_  sing like this before. She had heard of those who could weave enchantments with their voices, had even tried it herself in small ways, though she had had little success. She knew that songs could hold power. But this was different; his voice had the power to transport, to take her momentarily out of herself and throw her into a well of sorrow and history and lost things from which she felt she might never surface.

She stood and listened, until the song ended, fading away until it was lost amongst the shushing waves at her back. And then quite suddenly, she was back to herself, her boots sinking into the wet sand.

She ran to the headland, following where the sound had come from.

"Maglor!" she exclaimed, as she rounded the outcrop of rock. She stopped, seeing him standing there with his hair and his ragged cloak caught in a sudden salty breeze.

He turned sharply to face her, and his expression one of alarm.

"I-" she faltered. "What was that you were singing?" The words seemed laughably inadequate. "I did not understand the words."

He was frowning slightly, and she realised she had taken him by surprise.

"It is of my own composition" he said. "I do not sing it much."

She raised an eyebrow, questioningly.

"Noldolantë" he said, unwillingly. "A lament for my people."

"It… it is beautiful" she said, though that did not really describe it. "Beautiful and sorrowful."

He smiled slightly. “That is one way to put it, I suppose.”

"What does it mean? Can you translate it?"

He gave her a long look. “There is a translation. It loses something, of course, but it is reasonable. And when I say that, I mean I did it myself.”

"Will you sing it for me?"

He looked at her even longer this time. Nimrodel looked back into his ancient eyes, defiant. Finally he sighed and looked away, and began to sing.

The words were in Sindarin this time, but Nimrodel had the strange impression that it was not so much the words that were creating the images that danced before her eyes like ripples on the sea, but some power woven into the very fabric of the song itself. She saw the story unfold, clear before her; fair ships wrought in the shape of swans, bright swords, blood on the shore. The flames licking hungrily up to the sky. Years falling away like leaves, the bindings of an Oath growing tight. Hands that were soaked with blood, red and bright, the blood of innocents. A bright star rising into the sky, white and coldly beautiful and impossibly far away. Hands that were washed clean only to be bloodied again, and again, and on and on it went until Maglor’s voice was all that was left, his voice and his burned hands and the fading march of history, an ocean of loss.

The song ended, the last note fading softly as Maglor dropped his gaze. Nimrodel blinked, as though waking from a dream. She stared at him, and then at the burns on his hands, unable to speak.

He must have seen her looking, for he raised his hands between them, face bitter. “And now you know.”

She nodded slowly, feeling horror twisting through her stomach as she recalled the things those hands had done, the things the song had told of.

"And now you know why  _I_  cannot go back. Why the two of us are, emphatically, not the same.”

She felt anger start in her suddenly as she came back to herself, anger mingled with disgust. “I don’t know why I ever thought we  _were_  the same.”

"Nimrodel - "

"What did you expect me to think? Do you expect me to just treat you normally, after… after  _that?_ " It was the very fact of the beauty of the song, in stark contrast to its subject matter, that disturbed her most, she thought. "Why did you tell me?"

"You wanted to know."

She could not deny that, and yet that fact made her all the angrier, frustration and horror mingling sourly within her. “All this time…” she said, pushing back tears, “…all this time, you’ve been hiding…” you’ve been treating me like our situations are somehow equivalent?”

His voice was hard, cold now. “If you recall, I tried to tell you many times that they were not.”

She wanted to hit him. She turned away, nails digging into her palms. “Don’t seek me out again” she snarled at him, fighting back tears. All she could think of was the blood on those fair, pale hands, as they had once been. She did not look back as she left him there, fleeing blindly inland, away from the sea.

Nimrodel never did see him again. She returned to the river, in small secret places where no one would find her, but where she could still hear its comforting babbling, feel the memories wash over her. Memories of long, sunlit days long ago before the smell of salt-water had crept into her heart. Memories of Amroth, those that she clung to as though she were drowning. She sang too, sometimes, to block out the sound of that other song in her head.

 _Will they ever sing of me?_ She still did not quite believe it.  _Will they sing of Amroth? Undoubtedly._  She sang of him herself, and did not care for anyone else’s take on him, or on her treasured, greedily cherished memories.

She never sang of Maglor, but she thought about him sometimes.

Had she been too harsh on him?  _Categorically no._

Did she miss him, a little, as the years went on?  _…Perhaps, yes. A little._   _Perhaps things could have been different. Perhaps if I had not known, if he had not told me…_

She always stopped that thought before it went any further.

The river flowed on, changing little over the years, yet she never followed its course back to the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the quotation I added at the beginning is from one of my favourite poems, The Love Song of J. Afred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot. Though taken somewhat (okay very much) out of context here, I thought it was fairly appropriate.


End file.
